Regrets? Bush has too few to mention

Faced with a faltering economy and a precarious national security position, President George W. Bush made the best of a bad situation and sought to unite the country in spite of Washington’s toxic political culture.

That’s how Bush views his tenure in office, according to a recent round of exit interviews he and Vice President Dick Cheney have done as part of an effort to wind up their administration on a positive note.

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Their argument is not entirely convincing.

“The president and his advisers are focusing an enormous amount of effort on trying to politically shape and spin the legacy to improve his image in history’s eyes,” said former White House press secretary Scott McClellan. “I am not surprised. There has always been great effort placed on the political marketing of this presidency.”

Bush and Cheney aren’t saying much that Americans haven’t heard before, in one form or another. But as the two men take full advantage of their last month in the bully pulpit, there are a few key themes emerging in their narrative about the last eight years.

They did their best with a vulnerable economy: “I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived,” Bush told ABC’s Charlie Gibson, glossing over his long record as a deregulator, which stretches back to his time as governor of Texas.

He continued, referring specifically to the housing crisis: “I’m a little upset that we didn’t get the reforms to Fannie and Freddie…people will say that this administration tried hard to get a regulator.”

“Hard” might be pushing it, since a reform bill never made it through the GOP-controlled Congress. But the administration certainly raised the issue, highlighting the potential market risks of overgrown GSEs as early as April 2001.

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Dean Baker, the liberal economist who directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research, was incredulous at Bush’s attempt to displace blame onto his predecessor.

“If he was really troubled by any of the policies inherited from the Clinton administration he kept it to himself,” Baker said. “There’s plenty of blame to go on the Clinton administration. On the other hand, he’s been sitting there for eight years. It’s pretty hard to say there’s nothing you could have done.”

Bush has also cited his administration’s “52 months of uninterrupted job growth” as a feather in his presidential cap – though in many of those months job growth was tepid, falling below the rate at which experts say a healthy economy must grow.

Iraq was a grave and gathering threat: On defense policy, both Bush and Cheney have been especially assertive in backing up their records. They have even returned to one of their most familiar rationales to defend the war in Iraq: the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.

“Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction,” Bush told ABC’s Martha Raddatz last week. “I did not have the luxury of knowing he did not have them. Neither did the rest of the world until after we had come and removed him.”

Though Bush added that he regretted faulty pre-war intelligence, Cheney was completely unapologetic on the subject and swatted down Karl Rove’s recent suggestion that with different intelligence the country might not have gone to war.

“As I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren’t any stockpiles,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction…They also found that he had every intention of resuming production once the international sanctions were lifted.”